Illinois Hoops Recruiting Thread (August 2018)

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#1,201      

sacraig

sacraig
The desert
sacraig
Bill Lumbergh said:
??? How is he inherently dislikable? Seems like an overly antagonistic position. He is clearly respected by many of his peers in the profession, and those who knew him in the community know him to be a really good guy. Bash on his recruiting all you want, but don't stoop to baseless insults.
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Yeah I don't get it either. All of my interactions with him seemed pleasant. He did get a little bit whiny toward the end as the walls were closing in, but overall, I would not characterize him as dislikable. To me, he just seems like an Xs and Os coach who never really got comfortable with recruiting. That is great at SIUC (and worked well for him), but just won't fly at a place where the expectations are so much higher.
 
#1,202      

Deleted member 643761

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Guest
Deleted member 643761
Joel Goodson said:
Wow, they were stiffs. Hard pass. Carlwell was ranked pretty high, but that was completely based on size. He was a stiff in HS. Way, way overrated.
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Yep, and Semrau's rating was dropping like a rock.
 
#1,203      

bluemountain

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bluemountain
Second and Chalmers said:
Honestly, Guenther didn't do a whole lot wrong as it pertains to basketball specifically. The overall degradation of the University's athletic brand has had consequences for basketball of course, but you counteract that with two excellent head coach hires and one okay one, and probably most importantly Ubben which was a big strike when the iron was red hot and really put us on the facilities vanguard for a period of time (something that for all the Ron-the-Builder narrative was only really true of golf among other programs). Weber should have been fired in 2010, but luckily we were in no worse of shape two years later when he did get fired.

And I'm not one of those people who believes RG could have prevented Self from going to KU.

It's football where Guenther singlehandedly demolished the program.
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You know, the latter statement is interesting. IMO, he made a couple of clearly bad decisions - hiring Zook and the stadium "renovation" in which we reduced capacity were unforgiveable. He may have hung on to Tepper one season too long, but he didn't waste time getting rid of him when things went downhill in '96. In hindsight, it's hard to say RT was a good hire when Mason and Tiller were hired by (at the time) inferior programs, but at the time and through the 2001 season RT looked pretty darn good.

What really killed the program was Mackovic leaving without an AD in place. At the time, we were probably the third best job in the Big 10 and would have attracted a strong pool of candidates - don't forget we had hired Mackovic just 4 years earlier. Instead we promoted Tepper, NW hired Barnett, UW gained traction under Alvarez and the rest is history
 
#1,204      

DudeIllini

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Malibu
DudeIllini
Rap73 said:
What has Underwood done wrong for you to say that,if a recruit would look at this sight and see all the negative comments he would go to another school
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I don’t think recruits would incorporate S&C’s posts in their decision process, although that would explain a lot.

However, I agree that the OP saying BU has done almost everything wrong so far is dramatic and untrue. This is the S&C trap though, he says something inflammatory like this just to spark an argument when you come to BU’s defense.
 
#1,205      

TownieMatt

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CU Expat
Chicago
TownieMatt
Rap73 said:
What has Underwood done wrong for you to say that,if a recruit would look at this sight and see all the negative comments he would go to another school
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Luckily, today's recruits don't scour message boards and S&C doesn't have permission to recruit off-campus.
 
#1,207      

Calvin

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Calvin
bluemountain said:
IMO, he made a couple of clearly bad decisions - hiring Zook and
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I liked the Zook hire. We were pretty far down as a program, and yet he kept recruiting guys that wound up being first rounders. Guys that were fun to watch. And we went to a Rose Bowl. He wasn't much of a coach on game day, unfortunately, but often times a good recruiting coach will get you enough momentum to move up. I thought he gave us a fighting chance to move up in the college football world, and it was fun to have talent on the roster.

The Beckman hire looked like a blow-out loss to me. We just couldn't seem to get a decent coach to come here, and couldn't find someone worth taking a flyer on. His 4 conference wins in 3 years was worse even than I expected.
 
#1,208      

tpbradley

tpbradley
tpbradley
1) People are taking a post mentioning Darius Paul and Brunson seriously, and 2) someone thinks that recruits read this site and what they read has an impact on where they commit. Just two things that made me laugh out loud today so thank you, IllinoisLoyalty. Stay classy.
 
#1,211      

Second and Chalmers

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Second and Chalmers
bluemountain said:
He may have hung on to Tepper one season too long
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I could write a 1,000 page treatise on the crimes of Ron Guenther, but that doesn't belong in the Hoops Recruiting Thread, so I'll just briefly say that keeping Tepper after the Greg Landry/Chris Redman fiasco THEN missing a bowl with a wildly talented team who were ranked in the preseason is the original sin of everything we're still digging out of 23 years later. And the "renovation" took that dedication to failure and literally carved it in stone.

Rap73 said:
if a recruit would look at this sight and see all the negative comments he would go to another school
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For one thing I can't imagine wanting to read a message board whose intended audience was recruits. For two, if you think the trail of goateed suburban Peoria dads who desperately fawn in the replies of every recruit tweet are actually helping Illinois get those players, we have a significant difference of opinion.

Joel Goodson said:
Wow, they were stiffs. Hard pass. Carlwell was ranked pretty high, but that was completely based on size. He was a stiff in HS. Way, way overrated.
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Both Carlwell and Semrau could have been nice players had rotten luck not submarined their health.

The equivalent rankings of recruits that we are currently after would be something like Drew Timme and Jason Jitoboh. We would look at that - correctly - as a monster class.
 
#1,213      

sacraig

sacraig
The desert
sacraig
Joel Goodson said:
Nope.
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I am amazed to be saying this, but... I agree with S&C on this one (at least regarding Carlwell). You can teach a player to play faster provided they have some baseline level of athletic ability (like, even the unathletic Larry Bird would have enough). You can't teach height. It's perfectly possible he, should he have remained healthy, would have been developed into a tall and quick player. I realize player development has been rather foreign to our program in recent years, but once upon a time, we actually performed this service for our players.
 
#1,214      

Joel Goodson

Joel Goodson
respect my decision™
Joel Goodson
sacraig said:
I am amazed to be saying this, but... I agree with S&C on this one (at least regarding Carlwell). You can teach a player to play faster provided they have some baseline level of athletic ability (like, even the unathletic Larry Bird would have enough). You can't teach height. It's perfectly possible he, should he have remained healthy, would have been developed into a tall and quick player. I realize player development has been rather foreign to our program in recent years, but once upon a time, we actually performed this service for our players.
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I saw Carlwell in person several times for Proviso East and was not impressed. At all. Great frame though. Unathletic. Sparse basketball skills. Great frame though.
 
#1,215      

Second and Chalmers

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Second and Chalmers
The point is that those were sought after recruits with good offer lists, and coincidentally they very closely match what we're looking for right now positionally and skillset-wise. The reason that was a terrible class was because with three scholarships after a season where we were 37-2, played for the national title and sent three guys to the NBA, we could only manage a couple of nice players who didn't fill our positional needs at all, and we left one of the spots completely open. That's the craziest thing. We rolled over a scholarship after the 2005 season! When was the iron ever going to be hotter!?

But such is our lowly fate today that 2005's failure would be 2019's grand slam.
 
#1,216      

Illinibatt

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Illinibatt
Carlwell is still playing. Put up 27 points and 15 rebounds on Aug. 5, 2018.

220px-Brian_Carlwell.png
 
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